Picture Perfect
by Deathofme
Summary: SSHG. A grown-up Ms. Granger finds one of her favourite Hogwarts portraits empty. Written for the "Back from the Dead" challenge.


**A/N Written for the GrangerSnape100 community, and their challenge "Back from the Dead". Completely epilogue-compliant (if somewhat inconsistent when it comes to the childrens' ages) ... but that never stops our characters from having fun, does it? You'll see what I mean. Enjoy!**

PICTURE PERFECT

* * *

Ms. Granger peeked around the corner to ensure no one had caught sight of her, and slyly snuck into the storage room. She waved at the dust motes in the air and made her way over to the irascible portrait. In this room she was merely, Hermione.

She had told him his cutting remarks would not be forever indulged patiently, and had properly chastised it as his fault when they moved his frame to Hogwart's storage room. She was secretly relieved, however, as it added an element of privacy to their conversations.

"Though what exactly you're keeping secret, Merlin knows."

* * *

She had merely rolled her eyes at his sardonic tones and neatly changed the subject.

Ms. Granger, now just Hermione, looked at the empty picture frame and forgot to breathe for the span of a heartbeat.

Trembling, she sank to her knees.

"I _told_ you to be more agreeable, you stupid, _stupid_ man!"

He'd finally done it. He'd finally become so disagreeable they'd gone and chased him out of his frame. She found herself shaking violently and began to hiccough.

"Get up. This is most unbecoming of you."

Hermione froze as she felt a warm hand firmly grip her shoulder.

* * *

"S-S-Se…"

She backed up against the wall, his hand loosening its grip and falling to his side. He seemed to tower over her, despite there being only a foot's difference in their height.

"Well?" He purred.

Hermione's heart hammered against her ribcage. He was pale, his black hair was hanging down in front of his face – he was _smirking_.

He couldn't have been a ghost, the hand that had touched her shoulder was too solid, too warm. This couldn't be happening, _Merlin_, she must be dreaming…

Hermione wriggled away from him and fled the room.

"That was a disappointing reaction."

* * *

Snape stepped out into the hallway, taking a moment to observe his surroundings. These walls were incredibly familiar. They were just as he had last seen them, decades ago.

He found Hermione crumpled to the floor beside a statue of armor. She held her face in her hands and her shoulders were shaking.

"Good grief, woman, are you sniveling?"

She shot him an angry look through red-rimmed eyes, her face burning, before turning away again.

He knelt beside her, rocking on his heels. Her shaking lessened, and after a moment, she bravely looked up at him again, eyes puffy.

"How?"

* * *

"Improbability."

"Excuse me?" She said, confused.

He held out his hands and helped her to her feet. Gallantly, he offered his arm and they walked down the hallway.

"All in good time. First, I want a cup of tea. There are certain things one misses in the two-dimensional world."

Mrs. Norris spied them from down the hall and bounded towards them. She began to hiss threateningly.

"Still alive, are you? Bloody cat." Snape made to give her a swift kick.

Hermione pinched him roughly on the shoulder and he yelped, "What?"

"Oh… just making sure you're real and all that."

* * *

"Where do they keep your quarters?"

Hermione was strangely silent and he had to prod her gently before she responded. "I'm only visiting, Severus."

"I thought you were a professor."

"Only a parent."

He frowned, holding her under higher scrutiny. There were some subjects that had never come up in their conversations. He realized now this was deliberate.

Before Hermione could stammer an excuse, just to have him stop staring, she was almost bowled over by an energetic blur that whipped past her in Gryffindor colours.

"_Potter!_" Snape bellowed, "Fifty points from Gryffindor!"

"You don't have that power anymore, Severus."

* * *

Young James Potter, only in first year, stared at them, eyes widening. T_he Headmaster's portrait was alive!_ He looked to Hermione, silently begging for help. When Snape advanced towards him, he yelped and ran.

"Jimmy! _Wait!_"

James' sister ran past them. Unnoticing, in a whirlwind of brilliant red hair. Snape looked disturbed. Lily had never been sent to the Headmistress' office for being in trouble, like Jimmy had.

"Severus?" Hermione touched his arm.

He let out the breath he had been holding in. He turned to her, his eyes not as sad as she had expected.

"And your children, Hermione?"

* * *

"Rose is also in first year. Hugo will be coming next year."

It was the first Severus had ever heard of her children. He raised an eyebrow interestedly.

"Two?"

"Mmm."

"Gryffindor?"

Hermione smiled demurely at that. "Ravenclaw."

Severus looked very pleased. They stopped in front of a painting of a bowl of fruit. Severus tickled the pear until it laughed and allowed them into the kitchens.

"Miss Hermy! Winky has not seen you in _ages_."

Snape seated himself on a stool, appreciatively sniffing the aroma of dinner preparation. Hermione pushed a cup into his hands, and he sighed.

"Tea… "

* * *

Hermione watched Severus have his tea and felt a prickling in her throat. She was unsure of whether she would cry again, or begin to laugh hysterically.

All this time, she had known him only as a portrait. She had never known Snape the man, yet oddly enough, she had become fast friends with Severus the painting. To see him, flesh and blood, eating a scone, was surreal and overwhelming. He seemed not the least bit perturbed by his miraculous change of situation.

"Why do you stare like that, woman? Have I got butter on the end of my nose?"

* * *

"Does that happen often with you?"

Snape glared and ignored her. The prickle in her throat softened to an amused chuckle.

"Your daughter? Is she like you?"

She icily replied, "When did you become interested in children?"

Snape sniffed delicately. "I'm not interested in _children_. I'm interested in _your_ children. I have faith in there being a marked distinction between the two."

"She takes after me," She quietly said.

"Good. I should like to meet her."

Snape set down the tea things and strode purposefully out of the kitchen. Hermione sat gaping for a full minute before running after him.

* * *

Hermione found him standing outside the Ravenclaw common room, arguing with the door to be allowed in.

"I was a Professor and Headmaster of this school—"

"Severus!"

He looked up briefly. "Oh good, tell the bloody door to let me in."

"_If you think you can intrude upon my personal life_—"

"Mum?"

A young girl stood watching them curiously from the open doorway. "I heard a fuss… "

Snape looked taken aback. "She has red hair. Is she a _Weasley_?"

Hermione drew her daughter to her side, resigned to let events unfold as they may. "She's Rose Granger. She's mine."

* * *

Of the three persons sitting in the empty common room, only Snape seemed to be comfortable. Hermione sat awkwardly across from him, and Rose fidgeted beside her, biting back a hundred questions.

"What are your best subjects?"

Rose looked to her mother questioningly, before answering. "Arithmancy and Charms."

"Any you find difficult?"

"Potions."

He 'tsked' disappointedly, but seemed still to like her very much.

"Your mother was very good at Potions."

This was news to Rose. She looked askance at her mother. "She was?"

Snape looked disturbed for the first time.

"Your achievements are something you keep from your children?"

* * *

Hermione sat rigid in her chair. Her words were clipped. "I find nothing to boast about."

"You have _everything_ to boast about! The top of your year, a mind that rivaled Albus', your contributions to the war – you _survived_, Hermione. It was something I couldn't accomplish."

"S_top!_"

Hermione had risen from her seat. Her cheeks were an angry red. Snape was caught off-guard for the first time that day.

"Rose, do you have any homework to complete?"

"No—"

"Rose, _please_."

Moodily, Rose Granger rose from her seat, shooting daggers at her mother, and stormed away to her dormitory room.

* * *

"Now, I don't know exactly iwho you think you are/i, but I find your remarks to be intrusive and your behavior much too forward. What gives you the right to ask such personal questions—"

Hermione suddenly found Snape mere inches from her face and her angry tirade was put to an instant halt. His voice was dangerously low and wrapped in a silky purr. Her breath hitched.

"I am a puzzle to you, Miss Granger, just as you are a mystery to me. To think, I had thought I knew the woman, when I had merely befriended a mirage."

* * *

Snape firmly grasped her chair and drew it up to her in a 'bang'.

"Now _sit_."

"I will not be ordered about," she hissed.

"You will sit because you will want to hear my offer."

"Which is?"

"I want to know everything. Right from the moment I died onward. Your marriage, your children, your career, your life now. Why you are not a professor and why you keep your past a secret."

"In return?"

"Are you not interested to know how a man of oils and pigment suddenly sits before you now, breathing and alive?"

Hermione was silenced.

He chuckled.

* * *

"Well?"

Hermione fell heavily into her chair. Snape could see the battle warring within herself clearly written on her face. Come on, Granger. Surely this was something you were dying to learn.

"There! There he is!"

The door to the Ravenclaw Common Room had banged open. Jimmy Potter stood in the doorway, pointing at Snape, with a small army of staff behind him. At the front was Headmistress McGonagall, who looked as if she would faint.

"Minerva, you look so old."

"_Severus Snape_?"

Snape looked back at a shell-shocked Hermione and winked. "Duty calls. Let me know soon, won't you?"

* * *

Rose tired of her novel right when it was time for dinner. She emerged from her room to embarrassingly find her mother still sitting at the Common Room table, staring intently at the wood-grain. Other Ravenclaw students were passing through, giving her odd glances and tittering amongst themselves.

"Mum?"

Rose gently shook her mother's shoulder. Hermione looked up, disoriented.

"Mum, are you all right?"

"Fine. Fine, love."

"Who was that man?"

"No one," Hermione said dismissively.

"He seemed like someone."

Hermione looked at Rose properly, finally shaking out of her trance and firmly shook her head.

"He's no one."

* * *

"But _how_, Severus?"

"Don't wail so, Minerva. You've adopted more characteristics of your Animagus form since last I saw you."

Minerva wasn't amused. "And you've lost none of your barbarous wit, I see."

He smirked and sipped more of the lovely tea she had offered. "I told you, the answers are for Ms. Granger to know first."

"So go _tell her_ then!"

"I shall. When she's ready."

Minerva sighed disgustedly. "And just when shall she be ready?"

Severus smiled slyly into his teacup.

"Soon, I think. I have unfaltering faith in her thirst for knowledge, even if she does not."

* * *

Against her will, Hermione found the question of _How?_ still festering away in the back of her mind. She inwardly battled over whether to give in. She wasn't ready to reveal so much, but she wanted to _know_ so badly…

Disappointingly, she hadn't seen him again that day and assumed Minerva and other staff members were all getting their piece of him. Tired, she trudged back to Ravenclaw Common Room to say goodbye to Rose for the night.

She found Snape and Rose huddled at the table, arguing over a paper.

"What are you doing?"

Snape glanced up. "Potions homework."

* * *

Hermione left them without another word. Truthfully, she was slightly disturbed by the scene, but couldn't quite decipher why. Perhaps it was because she had never achieved such a domestically peaceful event with Rose herself.

Snape glanced over the small Common Room library, waiting for Rose to finish writing. He noticed the sixth-year Potions textbook cover was different and picked it up.

Rose noticed Snape had gone silent and looked over. "Kneazle got your tongue?"

The stunned look on Snape's face slowly gave way to a touched smile.

"Something of the sort."

_Advanced Potions Making: with revisions by S. Prince_

* * *

Hermione came again the next morning, not having slept a wink. It was still too early for the students to have eaten their breakfast, so she decided to see Rose later. After asking the ghosts and portraits, she found Snape in the kitchens, again.

He was having tea.

"All right," She said.

Snape looked up, politely curious, and gestured for her to sit.

"You go first."

"Fine." Hermione took a deep breath, steeling herself. "Shoot."

Snape looked her straight in the eyes, all his attention focused on her. In a soft voice he asked, "Where is Rose's father?"

"He's dead."

* * *

"How?"

"I don't know… " her voice faltered.

Snape's brow knitted in concern and he gave her a moment to recollect herself.

"How young were you when you married?"

"Very. After the war, everyone was happy. Everyone was in love. Harry married Ginny right after. I made Ron wait. I wanted to take my NEWT's first."

Snape's mouth quirked into a small smile at that, but his voice was still soft and cautious.

"And after?"

"He worked at his brother's joke shop. I worked with St. Mungo's. I developed healing potions. We had a flat. It was good."

"And then?"

* * *

"The children. Our jobs were stable and we thought the flat too empty and quiet. One right after the other. Rose and Hugo. Ron wanted to stay at home and be a house-husband. Told me I was better suited as the breadwinner."

She had a watery smile on her face, pausing for a moment to relive all the good moments of her life in her mind.

Snape was reverent of her private moment, but felt an odd twinge in his chest at the sight of how sweet those memories seemed.

"He 'wanted' to?"

"He fell sick. And he passed on."

* * *

"I tried, I tried so hard to learn what was wrong. We ran tests, we conducted experiments, we tried diagnostic spell after spell… I tried every cure – I must have invented a hundred a week. But death wanted him too much and he just… drifted away… "

She drew her hands up to her face. "Well, you can surmise I had to stay at home to care for the children. I only worked on temporary shifts at the hospital to pay bills. I haven't had time for lofty pursuits since his death."

Snape snorted mirthlessly. "I don't believe that."

* * *

Hermione looked up, stunned. "What?"

"I taught you for six years, if you had the will for 'lofty pursuits', you would have made the time. You would have driven yourself insane, but you would have made time. No. You allowed yourself to become stagnant because you were ashamed of yourself, Ms. Granger."

She looked as if she would protest, but he cut her off. "Your intellect failed you once when you needed it most, to save your husband, and now you have shut yourself from it completely. You have even kept it from your children. _That_ should make you ashamed."

* * *

Hermione looked as if he had slapped her across the face. And in a sense, he had.

"I see, and it was only this year that you began to visit Hogwarts and my portrait. Now that Rose attends here and you no longer have the excuse that you have no time. You were lonely. You wanted to forget your disappointment. You came to me, ignorant and impartial of your failure."

She looked away from him.

"Am I right, Hermione?"

She said nothing.

He tilted her face to meet his.

"You needn't be ashamed of the sentiment. I was lonely too."

* * *

Hermione's heart hammered wildly in her chest. She had bared her soul to him, and he had even seen past the facades she had laid down for herself. He was so close to her, she could count his eyelashes if she wanted to…

He suddenly smiled and pulled away.

"My turn."

Overwhelmed by their deep exchange, she shakily accepted the teacup he pushed into her hands. He was busily scribbling on a piece of parchment pulled out from his trousers pocket.

"There. That's how."

The parchment was filled with ancient runes and complicated Arithmancy equations she had never seen before.

* * *

Hermione frowned at the piece of paper, turning it on its side, upside down and right side up again, unable to make head nor tail of it.

"I don't think I've ever seen you so bamboozled by equations, Hermione."

"I don't understand it."

"Work through it."

Hermione sighed, setting the parchment down. "It's been years, Severus, I haven't looked at an Arithmancy chart in over ten years. You'll have to explain it to me."

Maddeningly, Snape pushed the parchment back into her hands. His tone brooked no refusal.

"You want to know then _solve it_. Victory tastes sweeter than defeat."

* * *

Hermione was annoyed at having answers withheld, especially as she felt she had lived up to her end of the bargain. However, Snape soon exited the kitchens, up for bedevilment of some kind, and made it clear he wasn't going to help her. Sighing, she looked at the parchments again.

The numbers, the runes, the equations, all scribbled hurriedly, swam in her mind's eye and gave her a headache. This wasn't fair! This was nothing she had ever learned in a textbook. This was all new, foreign…

She had become blind to a secret language that was once all hers.

* * *

"What's that, mum?"

"A bloody mess." Hermione sighed and put down her quill. "How were classes?"

"Fine. Professor Philter says I'm improving in Potions."

"That's good." Hermione looked at Rose as if she could see the woman her daughter would become for the first time. She felt a curious smile playing around her mouth.

Rose looked interestedly at the parchment. "It's Arithmancy."

"I can't understand it."

Rose sat down beside her mother, taking her quill. She got out a fresh sheet of parchment and began to scribble on it.

Hermione drew her chair in closer and watched her daughter work.

* * *

"You got stuck here, just reverse the Vectors law and it works itself out, like this… "

Slowly, they worked through the night, and Hermione's blindness began to lift as she watched Rose fiddle with the equations with ease. Soon, Hermione found a second quill and scribbled on the rough parchment as well.

"What's this rune, mum?"

"It goes here. It's your independent variable."

With her fresh eyes and eager mind, Granger junior coaxed and teased the dormant genius that had been sleeping for so long in Granger senior.

"Look! I think that's it!" Rose cried.

"But… what is it?"

* * *

"_Improbability_." Hermione spat.

She dumped the papers unceremoniously onto the rickety table, upsetting Snape's tea.

"What kind of fool game are you playing?"

Snape refused to be cowed. "I see you've worked them out."

"It took us two days to work through all these bloody runes and equations to discover this 'brilliant' magical theorem is that: _what is the most improbable to happen will become probable?_"

"You don't look pleased."

Hermione slammed her hand down on the table. Her hair was bushy and she looked as if she had not slept a wink those two days.

"What does it _mean?_"

* * *

"_Now_, Severus Snape."

"It is a law I developed when I was young. Fifth year. Fooled around with, to be honest. I had no idea that my schoolboy scribblings had actually been written into our magical network. But as you can see, while simple, the theory is airtight. So… it works."

Snape pointed to a specific rune on the parchment. "However, I worked in a condition that it would only apply to me. That represents my magical thread. I believe I was hoping to win the affections of a young woman, and believed it to be a most improbable event."

* * *

Hermione gaped. "You wrote this when you were _fifteen?_"

"Indeed. Yet, contrary to what I believed at the time, school relationships did not rank as the most improbable event to happen in my life. So it did not happen."

"Your coming back to life was the most improbable."

Snape had a sly smile across his face. "Not quite."  
He suddenly pulled her right up against him, his grin mischievous, their noses colliding.

"The most _improbable_ thing to happen, was that I would have a chance to be happy with one who was in love with me, and I with them."

* * *

Hermione gaped, and Snape took it as the perfect opportunity to kiss her. Startled, she slapped him.

"_Bloody hell_, woman - not so hard!"

Hermione stammered, "You mean, you love me?"

He nodded, rubbing his cheek balefully.

"And that… I love you?"

"Give the woman a bleeding medal… "

Hermione was trembling, her hand reaching out to touch him, yet afraid to close the distance.

"How do you know?"

Snape smiled, taking her hand in his. "You said it to my portrait. Do you remember?"

"I remember, I said—"

But Snape kissed her again instead, the words unnecessary and inadequate.

* * *

EPILOGUE—What Hermione Said

"Back again?"

Hermione smirked at the portrait, setting her bag down on the floor. "Displeased to see me?"

"Your words, not mine."

The smirk he returned signaled the jest of that statement. Hermione sat down on the floor and happily sighed, staring up at the painting.

"I think I shall have to pay an artist to create a likeness of me."

Snape's portrait snorted. "What good is there in coming back?"

Hermione sat quietly, her arms hugged around her knees. Small. Still.

"A lot of good. How simple things would be for me, if I were merely dabs of paint."

* * *

END


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